Welcome to Dadelaide

Remember when you were 14 and hated the world and your dad would wander through the living room wearing his cardigan with the leather buttons while you had friends over and were listening to music? And he’d try to be cool by making a dad joke or saying, “How about that Madonna, eh? Doesn’t wear very much, does she?” And then you’d notice he had a bit of Vegemite on his chin?

Well, Adelaide is your dad when you were 14.

There’s a new trend. Any event organiser worth his piss-and-party-pies at the work Christmas do is stuck on world record attempts. Last year, there was the attempt at the world’s biggest guitar band at the hugely underwhelming Adelaide International Guitar Festival. It failed dismally, but they refused to be deterred and decided to give it another good Aussie go at this year’s festival. They’ll fail again, of course, unless they bus people in from sheltered workshops all over the state.

Then there was yesterday’s stab at creating the world’s biggest and longest Mexican wave before the Christmas Pageant. Captive audience, you’d think, as people waited for Father Christmas and dumpy little fat chicks dressed as clowns to pass by. Epic fail. They tried twice and couldn’t get past the halfway mark. No one took into account the complete apathy of the local populace.

A week ago, a little town in Peru decided it was going to break a world record by hook or by crook, so it made the world’s biggest pair of jeans. I don’t know what bastard is going to wear 114-foot-tall denims (“Hi, can I get these taken up please? They’re a little long.”), but that’s beside the point. Now Lima gets to be home to the world’s biggest blue jeans and the previous record holders in Medellin, Colombia can sit around plotting revenge and drinking rum while they wonder what to do with their 113 foot jeans.

Sure, it’s a record. But it’s still pants.

Really, what were we going to do if we had broken the record? Change all the car number plates to “The Mexican wave state”? Erect a sign at the airport reading, “Welcome to Adelaide, holder of the world record for biggest Mexican wave?” It’s all so Dogpatch, USA. What do you do when you have no other claim to fame? Why you set a world record, of course. No point in going for anything that requires talent, of course, like eating 300 hotdogs in two minutes, and bona fide freaks are in huge demand, especially in India. And Lima has the biggest jeans, so that’s out. Ooh, I know! A mass participation record will make us sooooo cool. Madonna cool.

By the way, did you know you had Vegemite on your chin? Just there under your lip. Big smear.